Stanley cup: Bruins have choices to make

With the curtain drawing down on the Bruins' season, attention turns to 2013-14 and what kind of encore the team will make.

After winning the Stanley Cup in 2011, the Bruins were fortunate — and smart — enough to bring back 17 players from that team to make another run at this year's championship.

“We'll try and do it again, if I can,” general manager Peter Chiarelli said early in the playoffs.

But circumstances could mean that next season's club will have a distinctly different look.

Fortunately, Chiarelli used extensions to lock up players like Milan Lucic, Zdeno Chara, Brad Marchand, David Krejci, Tyler Seguin, Johnny Boychuk, Chris Kelly, and even Daniel Paille and Gregory Campbell, through at least 2014-15 and most for much longer. The only problem is that he might have overpaid some of them — Seguin at $5.75 million per year through 2018-19 and Lucic at $6 million per year through '15-16 come to mind — and that could come back to bite him this summer.

Ten members of the team that fought its way into the finals against the Blackhawks have contracts that will expire on July 1. Seven of them will be unrestricted free agents, which means they'll be free to test the market, field offers from other teams, and go elsewhere without Boston receiving any compensation.

Fortunately, many of them are fringe players or players the Bruins don't necessarly want or need back — forwards Kaspars Daugavins (restricted), Jay Pandolfo and future Hall of Famer Jaromir Jagr, who will be 42 years old by the time next year's playoffs roll around, and defenseman Wade Redden and Aaron Johnson.

But the list also includes goalie Tuukka Rask, who stamped himself as a legitimate No. 1 goaltender with the talent and wherewithal to lead his team to a championship, as well as forward Nathan Horton, who has been a playoff standout in two separate years but also carries the baggage of health questions — a concussion history and a chronic shoulder problem.

Even without considering the other players whose contracts are expiring — defenseman Andrew Ference, backup goalie Anton Khudobin and forward Jordan Caron (restricted) — the Bruins likely are looking at a situation where they'll have to choose between Rask and Horton.

The salary cap plummets from $70.2 million this season to $64.3 million next year. The Bruins' payroll, according to capgeek.com, stands at $60,083,810 — but that is without any salaries for the players whose contracts are up, including Rask, Horton, Ference, Khudobin and Caron.

That figure, however, also includes the $4 million cap hit of long-gone Marc Savard, and the Bruins are likely to exercise the option of putting Savard on the long-term injured list, which will free up that much more space. That means, in rough figures, the Bruins have $8 million to spend on their soon-to-be-unsigned players.

Even though he's only a restricted free agent, Rask — currently at $3.5 million — will get around $5 million. With defensemen Matt Bartkowski and others waiting in the wings, Ference is likely to become a financial casualty and end up elsewhere. That's unfortunate because he's great at playoff time, but the B's have too much depth on the blue line to pony up $2.5 million (his current salary) or more for him.

That leaves $3 million, which won't be nearly enough to satisfy Horton, who earned $5.5 million this year but carries a $4 million cap hit. The only way the Bruins could make that work is to jettison a player or two through trade or an amnesty buyout — someone like Campbell, Paille and/or Shawn Thornton, who earn between $1.1 million and $1.6 million each.

The name of Kelly ($3 million) has even been mentioned, but role players are the backbone of this team, and to sacrifice more than one of them for Horton, who is a very uneven performer in the regular season and can also be streaky in the playoffs, would be a dangerous gamble.

Plus, the Bruins need a backup to Rask. Khudobin earned $800,000, and he has said he'd like to come back, but the Bruins have promising youngster Malcolm Subban waiting in the wings along with minor leaguers Niklas Svedberg and Michael Hutchinson, whose contract is also up.

Jonathan Toews, who like Bergeron was injured in Game 5 and didn't finish, also was back in the Blackhawks' lineup and looked like he hadn't missed a beat.

Towes scored a short-handed goal in the second period to tie the game, 1-1. He took a faceoff against Kelly in the neutral zone and the puck squirted sideways, where Toews jumped on it and sped into the Boston zone, flicking a wrist shot past Tuukka Rask from the right circle at 4:24.

Toews also assisted on Dave Bolland's Cup-clinching goal with 58.3 seconds left, won 12 of 20 faceoffs, and had three hits, a takeaway and two blocked shots.

Seguin, with just one goal in 20 postseason games, continues to struggle with his offense, although his game has picked up in other areas. But he's being paid to score goals, and that hasn't happened since his first two playoff games against Tampa Bay in 2011, when he had three goals in the first two games of that series.

Since then, Seguin has just three goals in 40 postseason games.

"I've been trying to shoot a bit smarter as of late, not too many pointless shots," he said after Monday's pregame skate. "Tonight, I'm going to go out there and just try a little different tape job and go back to some junior roots and see if we can spark something there. But again, I just want to keep shooting, keep creating opportunities."

Seguin finishing with 70 shots on goal in the playoffs, just one less than team leader Patrice Bergeron, who has nine goals. Seguin did pick up another assist, his seventh of the playoffs, by setting up Chris Kelly for a first-period goal that gave the Bruins a 1-0 lead.

Coach Claude Julien said he thought the Bruins looked nervous at the start of Game 5, in which they started slowly, finished with a staggering 30 turnovers, and lost, 3-1, to fall one game away from elimination. Julien said he did not expect that to happen in Game 6.

“There is no panic,” he said the other day. “You're not going to push us away that easily. We're a committed group, and we plan on bouncing back.”

At Monday's pregame skate, he added: “I like the excitement of our team right now. They're excited to play tonight. They're not afraid of it. They're excited for the challenge.”

Teams with a 3-2 lead in the finals have now won 29 of 37 series since the best-of-seven format began in 1939. Twenty-one of those 28 teamsclosed it out in six games.

As everyone knows by now, the Bruins — in 2011 against the Canucks — were one of the eight teams that came back from 3-2 down. The Penguins did it in 2009 against Detroit, Tampa Bay in 2004 against the Flames, Colorado in 2001 versus New Jersey, the Canadiens in 1971 against the Blackhawks, the Maple Leafs in 1964 and 1942, both against the Red Wings, and Detroit did it in 1950 against the Rangers.

Dennis Seidenberg had 26 blocked shots in the series, leading all players. That gives him 55 in the postseason, just seven fewer than Boychuk, the NHL leader. ... Milan Lucic led the way with 35 hits in the series, and he's the runaway NHL leader with 103 in the playoffs. Chicago's Bryan Bickell was a distant second with 85. ... The Bruins had an 8-4 home record during the playoffs, but two of those losses were to Chicago. The Blackhawks were 5-5 as visitors in these playoffs, and led the NHL with an 18-4-2 road record during the regular season.